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This long-awaited volume featuring contributions from top African international lawyers and voices from the continent critically explores the notion of international investment law from an African perspective. It does so by confronting some of the very hard questions with regard to the relationship between international investment and development that have either eluded or not been properly addressed in contemporary scholarships. After many years of popularity, investment treaties have recently caused increasing concern among States, most prominently for the unbalanced nature of their content, the often inadequate safeguard of the regulatory powers of the host State and the shortcomings of international investment arbitration. Some States have upgraded their investment treaties, others have revised their investment treaty model, and others have opted for facilitation agreements. This innovative monograph critically explores all these contentious issues from a multidisciplinary perspective.

This book is the first monograph-length investigation of innovation and the innovation process from an archaeological perspective. We live in a world where innovation, innovativeness, creativity, and invention are almost laughably over-used buzzwords. Yet comparatively little research has been carried out on the long-term history of innovation beyond and before the Industrial Revolution. This monograph offers both a response and a sort of answer to the wider trans-disciplinary dialogue on innovation, invention, and technological and social change. The idea of innovation that permeates our popular media and our political and scientific discourse is set against the long-term perspective that only archaeology can offer in dialogue with a range of social theory about the development of new technologies and social structures. The book offers a new version of the story of human inventiveness from our earliest hominin ancestors to the present day. In doing so, it challenges the contemporary lionization of disruptive technologies, while also setting the post-Industrial-Revolution innovation boom into a deeper temporal and wider cultural context. It argues that the present narrow focus on pushing the adoption of technical innovations ignores the complex interplay of social, technological, and environmental systems that underlies truly innovative societies; the inherent connections between new technologies, technologists, and social structure that give them meaning and make them valuable; and the significance and value of conservative social practices that lead to the frequent rejection of innovations.

This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and representation in different borderscapes. It provides fresh insight into the ways in which borders, borderscapes and migration are imagined and narrated by offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border. The case studies in the volume contribute to the methodological renewal of border studies and present ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes. The case studies address the role of borders in narrative and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, video art and survivor testimonies in a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from northern Europe, via Mediterranean and Mexican–US borderlands to Chinese borderlands. The disciplinary approaches include critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies and political geography. The volume argues that borderlands and border-crossings (such as those by migrants) are present in public discourse and more private, everyday experience. This volume addresses their mediation through various stories, photographs, films and other forms. It suggests that narratives and images are part of the borderscapes in which border-crossings and bordering processes take place, contributing to the negotiation of borders in the public sphere. As the case studies show, narratives and images enable identifying various top-down and bottom-up discourses to be heard and make visible different minority groups and constituencies.

Critical theory and demagogic populism provides a detailed analysis of the relevance of the Frankfurt School’s work to understanding contemporary populism. It draws on the research that the Institute for Social Research conducted concerning domestic demagogues during its period of ‘exile’ in the USA. The book argues that the figure of the demagogue has been neglected in both orthodox ‘populism studies’ and in existing critical approaches to populism such as that of Ernesto Laclau. Demagogic ‘capture’ of populist movements and their legacies is thus a contingent prospect for ‘left’ and ‘right’ populist movements. An account of ‘modern demagogy’ is thus detailed, from the Institute’s own dedicated demagogy studies through to their dialogue with Weber’s work on charismatic leadership, the US liberal critique of demagogy and Freud’s group psychology. The Institute’s linkage of ‘modern demagogy’ to the culture industry speaks to the underestimation in ‘populism studies’ of the significance of two other ‘modern phenomena. The first is ‘cultural populism’ – the appeal to a folkloric understanding of ‘the people’ and/or ‘their culture’. The second is the pivotal role of modern means of communication, not only in the recent prominence of social media but demagogic exploitation of all media since the rise of literacy and the widening of the suffrage in the nineteenth century. The dialectical dimensions of these processes are also highlighted in reconstructing the Institute’s work and in extending these analyses through to the present. The book so concludes by weighing up potential counter-demagogic forces within and beyond the culture industry.

This book explores how social media are used by citizens to frame contentious parades and protests in ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland. It provides the first in-depth analysis of how Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were used by citizens to contest the 2013 union flag protests and the Ardoyne parade dispute (2014 and 2015). An essential read for researchers interested in digital mis- and disinformation, it will examine how citizens engaged with false information circulating on these platforms that had the potential to inflame sectarian tensions during these contentious episodes. It also considers the implications of this online activity for efforts to build peace in deeply divided societies such as Northern Ireland. The book uses a qualitative thematic approach to analyse Facebook, Twitter and YouTube content generated during the flag protests and Ardoyne parade dispute between 2012 and 2016. It also draws on semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders including bloggers, political commentators and communication officers from the main political parties, as well as the results of a qualitative content analysis of newspaper coverage of these contentious public demonstrations.

This book complements extant histories of diplomacy by discussing change in the form of tipping-points, understood as the culmination of long-term trends. The first part of the book discusses social evolution on the general level of institutions. The diplomatic institution has undergone four tipping-points: between culturally similar small-scale polities, between culturally different large-scale polities, permanent bilateral diplomacy, and permanent multilateral diplomacy. The consular institution has seen three: the emergence of the consul as the judge of a trading colony, the judge as a representative of the state, and the imbrication of the consular institution in unitary foreign services. The second part challenges extant literature’s treatment of diplomacy as a textual affair and an elite concern. It lays down the groundwork for the study of visual diplomacy by establishing diplomacy’s visual genres, discussing how diplomats spread images to wider audiences and drawing up a taxonomy of three visual strategies used for this purpose: a hegemonic and Western strategy, a national strategy, and a strategy that is spiteful of Western hegemony. Two case studies discuss the evolving place of the visual in one diplomatic practice, namely accreditation, and the importance of the social imagination. One possible evolutionary effect of the latter seems to be as a lair of hibernation for the otherwise threatened idea that diplomacy is not about dialogue but about the confrontation between good and evil. The book concludes by seeing the future of diplomacy in a continued struggle between state-to-state-based diplomacy and diplomacy as networked global governance.

Why did the international drug regulatory regime of the twentieth century fail to stop an explosive increase in trade and consumption of illegal drugs? This study investigates the histories of smugglers and criminal entrepreneurs in the Netherlands who succeeded in turning the country into the so-called ‘Colombia of Europe’ or the ‘international drug supermarket’. Increasing state regulations and intervention led to the proliferation of ‘criminal anarchy’, a ‘hydra’ of small, anarchic groups and networks ideally suited to circumvent the enforcement of regulation. Networks of smugglers and suppliers of heroin, cocaine, cannabis, XTC, and other drugs were organized without a strict formal hierarchy and based on personal relations and cultural affinities rather than on institutional arrangements. These networks used the excellent logistics and infrastructure of the country and stimulated the development of illegal drug production from Afghanistan to Morocco. They transformed the Netherlands into a transit hub for the international drug trade, supplying other European countries and the UK. They developed direct and indirect connections between supply countries and demand in the Americas. They also created a thriving underground industry of illegal synthetic drug laboratories and indoor cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands itself. Their operations were made possible and developed because of the deep historical social and cultural ‘embeddedness’ of criminal anarchy in Dutch society. Using examples from the rich history of drug smuggling, this book investigates the deeper and hidden foundation of the illegal drug trade, and its effects on our drug policies.

This collection of chapters provides the most comprehensive study of the theory and practice on the contribution of international organisations and non-State actors to the formation of customary international law. It offers new practical and theoretical perspectives on one of the most complex questions about the making of international law, namely the possibility that actors other than states contribute to the making of customary international law. Notwithstanding the completion by the International Law Commission of its work on the identification of customary international law, the making of customary international law remains riddled with acute practical and theoretical controversies which have been left unresolved and which continue to be intensively debated in both practice and scholarship. Making extensively reference to the case-law of international law courts and tribunals as well as the practice of treaty-monitoring bodies while also engaging with the most recent scholarly work on customary international law, this new volume provides innovative tools and guidance to legal scholars, researchers in law, law students, lecturers in law, practitioners, legal advisers, judges, arbitrators, and counsels as well as tools to address contemporary questions of international law-making.

Madrid on the move is a full-length monograph on illustrated print culture and the urban experience in nineteenth-century Spain. It provides a fresh account of modernity by looking beyond its canonical texts, artworks, and locations and exploring what being modern meant to people in their daily lives. The nineteenth century marked a crucial moment for cities across the West. Urbanisation, technological innovations, and the development of a mass culture yielded new forms of spectatorship and experiencing city life. Madrid underwent these processes just as many other European capitals did, and, as a result, the effects of urban and social change were at the heart of the growing number of circulating images and texts. Rather than shifting the loci of modernity from Paris or London to Madrid, this book decentres the concept and explains the modern experience as part of a more fluid, wider phenomenon. Meanings of the modern were not only dictated by linguistic authorities and urban technocrats they were discussed, lived, and constructed on a daily basis. Cultural actors and audiences continuously redefined what being modern entailed and explored the links between the local and the global, two concepts and contexts that were being conceived and perceived as inseparable. Across images and printed media – from illustrated magazines, caricatures, and postcards to journalistic writing, guidebooks, and maps – what surfaced was an acute awareness of the demands of modernisation and a feeling of forming part of (whether half-heartedly or with conviction) an increasingly entangled world.

Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval (Isabelle Émilie de Tessier [1847–90]), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century. Taking a critical theory approach, the book discusses key themes and practices of Duval’s vision and production, relative to the wider historic social, cultural and economic environments in which her work was made, distributed and read. It identifies Duval as an exemplary radical practitioner in an urban media environment, in which new professional definitions were being created, and in which new congruence between performance, illustration, narrative drawing and novels emerged. The book divides into two sections: Work and Depicting and Performing, interrogating the relationships between the developing practices and the developing forms of the visual cultures of print, story-telling, drawing and stage performance. On one hand, the book focuses on the creation of new types of work by women and gendered questions of authorship in the attribution of work, and on the other, the book highlights the style of Duval’s drawings relative to both the visual conventions of theatre production and the significance of the visualisation of amateurism and vulgarity. The book pays critical attention to Duval the practitioner and to her work, establishing her as a unique but exemplary figure in the foundational development of a culture of print, visualisation and narrative drawing in English, in a transformational period of the nineteenth century.

In place of linear historicism, this book offers a new approach to architecture by examining the matter of the miracle in relation to baroque architecture through an interrogation of the relationship between architecture and the sacred in the economy of the relic. It considers the Treasury Chapel as the interaction of movement and sanctity in relation to matter and affect, particularly the transport of salvation. The rituals of the Treasury Chapel made visible the new cartographies and choreographies of spiritual authority that fed it and that it espoused and generated. The book focuses on the miracle of San Gennaro, the blood that courses through the chapel and its telling. It focuses on the Renaissance Succorpo chapel below the main altar of Naples Cathedral as the principal precursor to the Treasury Chapel. The book explores how the enclosed aristocratic convent of Santa Patrizia used its relics of St Patricia to vault its enclosure walls and to intervene in the Treasury Chapel, quite beyond its own confines, to secure and extend its own spiritual authority in Naples. It investigates the relationships between silver and salvation activated and opened by the Treasury Chapel’s many splendid reliquaries. The book examines the implications of the wider politics of silver from its mining to its sustenance of Spanish monarchy and Spanish rule in Naples to its surfacing in those reliquaries. It addresses the question of how and why silver affords a peculiarly Neapolitan bridge between the brutality of the mines and the saints’ whispers in heaven.

This book traces the creation, maintenance, and contestation of the militarized environments from the establishment of France’s first large-scale and permanent army camp on the Champagne plains in 1857, to military environmentalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In doing so, it focuses on the evolving and profoundly historical relationship between war, militarization, and the environment. The book treats militarized environments as simultaneously material and cultural sites that have been partially or fully mobilized to achieve military aims. It focuses on the environmental history of sites in rural and metropolitan France that the French and other militaries have directly mobilized to prepare for, and to wage, war. They include such sites as army camps, weapons testing facilities, and air bases, as well as battlefields and other combat zones, but not maritime militarized environments, which arguably deserve their own book. First World War cemeteries and the memorial landscapes of the D-Day beaches remain places of international importance and serve as reminders of the transnational character of many French militarized environments. And although the book focuses on the environmental history of militarization within metropolitan France, it speaks to issues that mark militarized environments across the globe, such as civilian displacement, anti-base protests, and military environmentalism. By focusing on the French case, the author aims to encourage reflection and discussion on the global issue of military control and use of the environment.

Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886–1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists’ representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland, such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral, falling outside of the dominant disciplinary narratives of nationalism or modernism. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book chiefly examines artworks by of Walter Frederick Osborne (1857–1903), Rose Mary Barton (1856–1929), Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), Harry Aaron Kernoff (1900–74), Estella Frances Solomons (1882–1968), and Flora Hippisley Mitchell (1890–1973), encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate how the city was also the subject of a range of visual depictions, including those in painting and print. Focusing on the images created by these artists as they navigated the city’s streets, this book offers a vivid visualisation of Dublin and its inhabitants, challenging a reengagement with Ireland’s art history through the prism of the city and urban life.

The book considers all of Elizabeth Siddal’s poems in the contemporary critical context of the ongoing retrieval and re-evaluation of nineteenth-century women’s poetry. More significantly, it close reads the texts alongside those of five male authors, Dante Rossetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, Ruskin and Keats, who were either personally known to her or were a source of influence or inspiration. Modern scholarship has tended to include female voices in single-sex anthologies which stress their unique collective contribution but shield them from comparison with the much larger male canon, which denies lesser-known poets like Siddal an augmented critical reception. Association with these ‘greats’ of Victorian and Romantic literature enhances and consolidates her reputation and encourages alternative readings of poems that at first glance can appear slight, self-indulgent and derivative. The work of contemporary female poets, notably Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning is used to evaluate the distinctive and meritorious nature of Siddal’s oeuvre and all the poems are read with reference to the prevailing social, religious and political contexts that had a bearing on their construction and reception. As Siddal’s poems are very short and ambiguous their initial impression is visual, making the inclusion of certain of her artwork an informative entrée to chapters that consider her poetic dialogue with the interplay of erotic and spiritual love, the ballad tradition, the Romantic conception of the physical and spectral body, and the nineteenth-century ‘woman question’ while reflecting upon the paradoxes and dualisms that pervade her work.

Precarious objects is a book about activism and design. The context is the changes in work and employment from permanent to precarious arrangements in the twenty-first century in Italy. The book presents design interventions that address precarity as a defuturing force affecting political, social and material conditions. Precarious objects shows how design objects, called here ‘orientation devices’, recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life. Three microhistories illustrate activist repertoires that bring into play design, and design practices that are grounded in activism. While the vitality, experimental nature and traffic between theory and praxis of social movements in Italy have consistently attracted the interest of activists, students and researchers in diverse fields, there exists little in the area of design research. This is a study of design activism at the intersection of design theory and cultural research for researchers and students interested in design studies, cultural studies, social movements and Italian studies.

Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.

Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which is a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Assembled at the intersection of thought and practice, biosocial power attempts to bring envisioned futures into the present, taking hold of life in the form of childhood, thereby bridging being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. Taking up a critical perspective which is attentive to the contingency of childhoods – the ways in which particular childhoods are constituted and configured – the method used in the book is a transversal genealogy that moves between past and present while also crossing a series of discourses and practices framed by children’s rights (the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage and entrepreneurship education. The overarching analysis converges on contemporary neoliberal enterprise culture, which is approached as a conjuncture that helps to explain, and also to trouble, the growing emphasis on the agency and rights of children. It is against the backdrop of this problematic that the book makes its case for refiguring childhood. Focusing on the how, where and when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to researchers and students interested in examining the relationship between power and childhood through the lens of social and political theory, sociology, cultural studies, history and geography.

The book focuses on the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, using the city as a case study to read the ways in which memory is being written into South African urban space two decades after the end of apartheid. At the core of the book is the question of how history is written into public space, and how inscriptions of the past and its meanings are being challenged. This reading of public space and memory is located in a context where the promises of ‘reconciliation’ and the ‘rainbow nation’ are largely falling apart, and one in which South African cities remain in dire need of dramatic spatial and social transformation. The book is organised around four examples of memorial sites/practices, highlighting some of the ways in which public memory has been circumscribed by the state as well as the ways in which this circumscription has been contested. These include the Red Location Museum of Struggle, a highly contentious museum project; histories of forced removals in the suburb of South End; the activism and iconography of a group called the Amabutho, which was active in the city’s townships during the struggles of the 1980s; and heritage-related public art projects in the city centre. These examples collectively illuminate the spatial politics of memory in the twenty-first-century post-apartheid city, and the intersections between urban transformation and public memory.

This book explores the nature of decision making in one of the most crucial – yet also the most understudied – aspects of the regulatory system around biomedical research: research ethics committees. Every month, all over the UK, groups of people sit down and decide what kind of research should be carried out on patients within the National Health Service (NHS). These groups – Research Ethics Committees (RECs) – made up of doctors, nurses, researchers, and members of the general public, help shape the future of medicine, and play a crucial role in the regulation of a wide range of research from social science to epidemiology, vaccine and drugs trials, and surgery. Despite coming into existence in the late 1960s, and the considerable literature bemoaning the chilling effect such review has on biomedical research, we don’t know very much about how these bodies make decisions. This book provides one of the first empirical examinations of this kind of regulation, drawing on observational, interview, and archival data to give in-depth ethnographic insight into RECs, as they operate in the UK NHS. A key insight of this work is that, despite the trappings of a modern regulatory system – the operating procedures, guidance documents, and websites – NHS REC decision making revolves around very old-fashioned aspects of social life such as interpersonal trust, reputation, and the performance of character, and that an accurate understanding of this kind of regulation requires an acceptance of the inherently social nature of the processes involved.